Meet the heavy lifters of Quebec's airwaves

You don't need to turn to the sports pages to find out who won last night's Canadiens-Flyers match-up. Specialty channel Le Réseau des Sports (RDS) has been so dominating the ratings in Quebec of late, it was a shoo-in before the puck even dropped.

That is why TQS, Quebec's woe-begotten third network, ran a dubbed version of an English-Canadian made-for-TV movie. In other words, it didn't even try. TQS got another drubbing at 10, when its nightly news faced off against that of Quebecor-owned TVA.

This kind of agony is nothing new for TQS. From owner to owner, the 22-year-old network has lurched from crisis to crisis. The December decision by majority shareholder Cogeco Inc. to place TQS under court protection from its creditors only promised more of the same pain for the next owner.

Enter the Rémillards. The fraternal front line that's become a hot Question Period topic in Ottawa and Quebec City alike this week doesn't believe in a lot of fancy stick-handling. The proposal of their Montreal-based Remstar Corp. to buy TQS and eliminate the news operations - and 270 of the network's 480 jobs - is about as straight shooting as you can get. And it just might work.

Maxime, 33, and Julien Rémillard, 35, are rewriting Canadian broadcasting policy by forcing the hand of a federal regulator that has dithered about how to bring rules conceived in the era of tubes and transistors into the digital age.

In doing so, the Rémillards risk succeeding where Ivan Fecan and Leonard Asper, the respective heads of CTVglobemedia and CanWest Global, have so far failed. But their networks stand to benefit just as much as TQS if the Rémillards get their way.

In case you've never heard of them, les frère s Rémillard cut an increasingly imposing swath through Montreal, particularly the pricey old part where Remstar is headquartered and where the family owns Le St-James, the $500-plus boutique hotel favoured by Madonna and Paris.

Movie producer Maxime has lately had Karine Vanasse, Quebec's "It" actress du jour, on his arm at numerous red carpet affairs. He's producing a feature on the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre in which she stars. In addition to being second-in-command to CEO Maxime at Remstar, Julien, a big-boned fellow and self-described former hockey goon, works with dad in the garbage business.

Oh, yes, the boys came by their flash - and bravado in business - genetically. Dad is Quebec waste management mogul Lucien Rémillard, 61, who made millions by selling out to Hamilton's Fracassi brothers in the mid-90s, only to launch himself back into the business with RCI Environnement Inc., which now calls itself Quebec's biggest waste management outfit.

The elder Rémillard also owns a million shares (worth about $8-million) and sits on the board of Burlington, Ont.-based Waste Services Inc., a Nasdaq-listed company whose largest shareholder is another big Hamilton name, the DeGroote family of Laidlaw fame.

Lucien Rémillard was recently asking $18-million for his 23,000-square-foot mansion on 100 hectares south of Montreal, which is equipped with 10 fireplaces, 12 bathrooms and some mean-looking chandeliers.

The agent, Toronto broker Richard Ling, refused yesterday to say whether the property - more like country - was still on the block.

The Rémillards are not easily intimidated by regulators - and when you're in the waste management business, you deal with a lot of regulators. The first family business is no stranger to controversy, since its dump sites are a NIMBY nightmare.

By the time the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission gets around on June 2 to holding hearings on Remstar's request to amend TQS's licence and scrap the news operations, the Rémillards will in effect already have done so. That is, as long as TQS's creditors, who vote May 22, approve Remstar's purchase of the network - for which the Rémillards are offering to pay a mere ten-spot.

Yes, that's $10.

CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein cannot simply allow the Rémillards to eliminate all news content without giving ammunition to those in Quebec who call for full provincial control of telecommunications. Liberal Premier Jean Charest has put Ottawa on guard, warning that its failure to protect TQS's news operations will have political consequences.

Yet, at the same time, the CRTC cannot maintain requirements to broadcast news on TQS, which lost $18-million last year, without ensuring it has the resources to fulfill them. TQS is living (or rather, dying) proof that conventional networks must be able to charge cable and satellite providers fees to carry their signal, similar to the meaty sums they are forced to fork over to specialty channels such as RDS.

RDS, a unit of Globe and Mail owner CTVglobemedia, had a 56-per-cent market share in Quebec on Saturday night. Throughout the playoffs, it has consistently beat the conventional Quebec networks - Radio-Canada, TVA and TQS. That means RDS is increasingly draining advertising dollars from the conventional networks on top of getting carriage fees.

During the rest of the season, it's the Quebec specialty channels owned by Astral Media that are squeezing the conventional networks' advertising base. Astral's VRAK, Canal Vie and Canal D channels had operating margins in 2007 of 41, 47 and 56 per cent, respectively. TQS has not seen black ink in its entire life.

The Rémillards have tabled an immodest proposal by the polite standards of Canadian broadcasting. But somebody had to do it. The distortion caused by the current rules is worse in Quebec than anywhere.

If Mr. von Finckenstein allows TQS to collect carriage fees in exchange for an undertaking to maintain some or all of the news operations, he will likely have to do the same for all conventional networks, including CTV and Global. He was probably already leaning that way, if his line of questioning during recent broadcasting hearings is any indication.

But Ottawa can move awfully slowly sometimes. With the Rémillards in town, it's being forced to speed up a bit.